


chiaroscuro

by wispenwillows



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1920s, Alternate Universe - Journalism, F/M, and eponine's chinese, in which enjolras is an anarchist altar boy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-29
Updated: 2017-07-29
Packaged: 2018-12-08 07:00:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11641365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wispenwillows/pseuds/wispenwillows
Summary: it’s a strange town for a blonde from boston and wraith borne of the shadows of chinatown. [au, drabble]





	chiaroscuro

* * *

 

 _Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies from the lake  
_ _and dress them in warm clothes again_

 

* * *

 

He lives in the seedier part of town, where neon lights flicker and buzz under the hood of night, and the moon falls sweetly through slats over the window. He’s got a pencil tucked behind one ear and calloused, ink-stained fingers that fidget and twist up into his greasy, oil-stained shirt and twine over, under, behind his suspenders. The electric energy that courses through him makes him light-headed and giddy, though impatience stains his veins like poison.

 _She should be here already_ , he thinks as he waits. _We agreed to meet at ten_. It’s ten-thirty already, and the cracked timepiece on the mantle is a sinister metronome.

When finally there comes a sharp knock on the door, he almost leaps out of his seat to crack the door open. And there she stands, a little slip of a thing, in someone’s castoff sequined dress, a shadow in silver and stars, holding in her hands a folder and in her eyes a grin.

“You’re late.”

“And you’re impatient,” she says, shoving the file at him and letting herself into the room.

He nudges the door closed with his foot and thumbs through the papers while she makes herself comfortable on the dingy settee and watches him. People in New York, he’s noticed, are practiced in the art of looking away, staring at a fixed point in space and pretending not to notice. But she gazes at him brazenly, without any shame, and he knows these are new mores for a new age, but the altar boy he might still be under the long hair and the anarchy shifts, wishing her gaze weren't quite so _penetrating_.

“Were you nervous I’d get stopped and jailed?” she smirks, draping one leg over the arm of the chair and propping her dark head up. “Has the Tin Man found a heart?”

“I was nervous,” he is quick to correct her, “because I would've missed my deadline if you didn't show.”

“Does anyone even read your newspaper?” she grouses. He doesn’t deign to answer her, which is good, because she isn’t looking for an answer. She stares at the peeling yellow wallpaper and thinks how lucky he is to have her, how lucky he is to have had the money to buy her services, because this pretty little rich boy would not have had the privilege of her company otherwise. She has better things to do, nicer places to be, sweeter people to hang around.

Still, she stays, and it’s only partly because of the money. And he is glad she stays, and it’s only partly because of the silent company she sometimes offers. New York is a big city, after all, and it is so easy to feel alone.

* * *

 

_How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running  
                                                    until they forget that they are horses._

 

* * *

 

Blonde-haired blue-eyed Bostonians who graduate from Brown are the very picture of the Modern American Boy in all his vigour and youth and idealism, except that Modern American Boys are not often anarchists. Modern American Boys do not go out of their way to ruin their good looks staying up all hours of the night so that bruises dull the keenness of their brisk blue eyes and dirt weighs down their amber curls.

No, modern American boys go to speakeasies and kiss daring girls and glow and glitter under the glimmer of electric lights and they forget, forget, forget all they lost in the wake of the war. They close their eyes and pretend not to see, because to see is to know and to know is to remember and to remember is to die a thousand times over. You can’t, after all, recapture the innocence you lost, but you can fake its brilliance with borrowed luminescence that drowns out the sorrow of the stars.

You can push Death away that way. At the very least you can ignore the way it claimed a father you never loved and a brother who tousled your hair one last time before he died two weeks into his deployment without even a letter home. You can ignore the way it always lingered in your memory, ignore that death is a weapon of state.

But he refuses to not see, because he has always been marked for death.

He takes his coffee black and the caffeine tides him over until the sun breaks through the night, whereupon he crawls like a cat to sleep in the warm rays of morning.

She thinks it’s a vanity – there’s hardly anything keeping him from working by day, after all, but then, what does she know? More than anyone, she ought to understand that night keeps her secrets and doesn't cede them to the morning. But she’s just a Chinatown brat who really shouldn’t be hanging out with men like him, but he likes it and she doesn’t mind, so she stays. Only for as long as it pleases her, though, for she blows where the wind will take her and she always has done.

Like a leaf feathered along by a lilting breeze, she languishes. But he's electric, even as he's working by candlelight, keyed up and high-energy until the day he'll simply––go out. She cradles his golden head in her small brown hands one day when he’s fighting to keep his eyes open and she’s telling him to just let them close. It’s ridiculous, she thinks, the way he thinks he’s superhuman, both less and more than he is. The way he thinks that he’s beyond sleep, at least until he finishes this last article. Thinks he’s beyond light, when he is the very embodiment of it.

She sets his head in the dust when she hears him start to snore and crawls on all fours to the floorboard under which he’s hidden his stash of booze. Not that he drinks it. You can take the boy out of church, but you can never, not ever, take the guilt out of the boy. But his friends swing by sometimes, writers and musicians and libertines who drink toasts to revolution. She picks at the floorboard, prying it up with chipped nails and calloused fingers, stealing a sip from a silver flask. It's bad, even for bootleg––the fire licks through her, and she breathes out slowly. This is pain, but it's exquisite. Forbidden. And so, of course, all the more desirable.

 

* * *

 

_Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means we’re inconsolable._

 

* * *

 

He’s always maybe a little disappointed when she has better things to do than to swing round, which is maybe (only maybe) why he’s a little loose with his spare change and asks her to do runs for him even when he doesn’t necessarily need it.

She’s always maybe a little scared whenever he asks it of her, though a thousand horses couldn't have dragged it out of her. Dark alleys do not frighten her, nor bureaucrats nor policemen, but the night would often close in to remind her of her desperate lonesomeness. Often on these illicit runs she would gravitate towards the flickering electric lights of some twenty-four-hour restaurant like a moth drawn to the flame, but she always runs before it starts to hurt.

Sometimes from the dark of the windows he gazes down at her, golden curls bowed to catch a glimpse of the waif who slips from shadow to shadow like those are the people among which she most belongs, drifting nowhere in particular. There is a way about her that makes him ache with something close to longing. He feels restless when she is around – his fingers yearn to reach for her, his eyes get the better of him, and the wanderlust his mouth feels will only be satisfied when it knows the shape of her own.

 _Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned_.

He has more important things to worry about, bigger things planned, a world to change before he can stop for a primrose smile.

(Love, too, is revolutionary.

But he doesn’t know this yet.)

* * *

 

 

 _Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us._  
These, our bodies, possessed by light.  
_Tell me we’ll never get used to it._

 

* * *

 

It isn’t love but need that drives her lips to his, a compulsion to be so near a person their scent tangles in her hair. His skin is electric, and she's shocked to the marrow. She’s even more shocked, though, when he starts kissing her back, his lips responding eagerly to hers, an ardent, worshipful caress. His hands flutter up to ghost her face. She stops for a second, and thinks she might sob, but he dips his head and presses his mouth to her collarbone and the reverence rolls off him in great waves. She presses his pale hands into her dark face and soaks it in.

Sudden as it starts, it’s over. He’s gasping, one hand pressing up against his heart as if to force it still, but her breathing is steady. She's luxuriating in everything kisses should have been, but never were, until – well. A small smile settles on her lips as she runs her fingers from his neck to the small of his back, and he shivers.

“Stay tonight?” he asks, because loneliness is his own secret ache and his best articles are written when she is there to tear them apart.

“I had made plans with the mayor tonight,” she teases, “but I’m sure he won’t mind if I blow him off.”

When the bitter ghost of dawn haunts the golden sliver of jagged rooftops, they agree through mutual silence not to speak of it, but then, they don’t have to. He will watch the sun fall on her upturned face to illuminate a smile that could put Apollo to shame and she will shyly tangle her fingers in his. Something has shifted, but words are of no use – a little sleepy smirk of the girl curled up on his couch says more than an entire tome, and the way she pushes her fingers through his hair better than a mouth full of prophecy.

He could bathe in the glow of her chiaroscuro forever, this girl woven from darks and lights, never once anything less than herself.

**Author's Note:**

> I've been slowly moving over high-school era Les Mis fic over to AO3 and dusting them off so they're a mite less embarrassing but someday I really will circle back around to them and rework them so they're better. 
> 
> the lines are from richard siken’s scheherazade.


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